SAN FRANCISCO, CA.- The 500 Capp Street Foundation announces the opening of The Disagreeable Object (February 3 through April 29, 2017) at the David Ireland House. The opening of The Disagreeable Object also marks the launch of The Foundations new Visiting Artist Series, featuring site-specific work in the exhibition by inaugural visiting artist, Virginia Overton, as well as the opening of The Garage, a new permanent free rotating exhibition space located in the homes former carport.
The exhibition, The Disagreeable Object, takes its title from Alberto Giacomettis surrealist sculpture, The Disagreeable Object, 1931. A defying sculptural attempt against artistic categorization, poised between movement and rest, between art and non-art, The Disagreeable Object is a rebellious and humorously unappealing object. Its vulgar shape is embodied in a form that may be disturbingly incomprehensible, but nevertheless sculpturally perfect. The 500 Capp Street exhibition, The Disagreeable Object, comments co-curator Diego Villalobos, hinges on alternative definitions of good taste, situating sculpture in the realm of attitude, beyond its material constraints.
During a lecture given at the San Francisco Art Institute in 1987, David Ireland alluded to his own similar sculptural concerns, comparing his work with that of Giacomettis sculpture and he asked, How does one develop a form that evades categorization? Davids inquiry prompted him to further develop an artistic process that engaged with non-traditional materials and situated work in unusual artistic contexts.
Notes, Bob Linder, co-curator, The exhibition uses Giacomettis surrealist sculpture as a point of conversation between specific David Ireland artworks from The 500 Capp Street Foundations collection and features a quintessential Ireland sculpture, on loan from SFMOMA, A Decade Document, Withcomet, Andcomet, Andstool, 1980-1990. The work is reliquary cabinet of a decade of accumulated empty toilet paper rolls, with two cans of house-cleaning product and a stool beneath it, of which the title playfully alludes. The cabinet engages in a tongue-and-cheek way with Joseph Beuys ideas of social sculpture and the dematerialization of the art object. In addition, the exhibition pays attention to Irelands Torpedoes (late 1970s), Sundaes (1980s), Earrings (1980s), and Chair Maquettes (1998), which share a similarity in their dysfunctional development as sculptures. Irelands crudely made Earrings and Torpedoes intersect between the organic shape of dung and that of an abstract form. These abstract forms are seen repeatedly throughout Irelands 500 Capp Street House. Sundaes, sculptures Ireland created by pouring concrete into an ice cream dish and inserting a spoon before the material dried, play with the relationship between the real and its artificial representation. With the Chair Maquettes, or architectural models, Ireland intentionally avoided working with one-to-one scale, instead using the size of the maquettes to alter a viewers perception of the form. The artworks featured in The Disagreeable Object exhibition, relate to objects we recognize or desire, but which have been abstracted both psychologically and formally. These works are humorous, strange, and meant to challenge our idea of traditional sculpture.
Visiting Artist Series
In conjunction with The Disagreeable Object, The 500 Capp Street Foundation announced the launch of a new exhibition-focused programming initiative, the Visiting Artist Series, beginning with New York-based artist Virginia Overton, February 3 through April 29, 2017. This new exhibition related program builds a direct relationship between the Visiting Artist and the David Ireland House, as each Visiting Artist creates new works of art to be displayed alongside Irelands artworks in the coinciding exhibition. In addition to participating in the Foundations quarterly exhibition program, the Visiting Artists will engage in public programs, including conversations and special events at the David Ireland House. Overseen by The 500 Capp Street Foundations curatorial team, the Visiting Artists for the 2017 exhibition schedule include Virginia Overton (Winter), Felix Gonzalez-Torres (Spring), Bethan Huws (Summer) and Michael E. Smith (Fall).
Virginia Overton
Virginia Overton's work comprises installation, sculpture and photography, often beginning intuitively as a direct response to her physical presence in a particular space. Through a trial and error process, she creates sculptures that are performative, sometimes obstructing, bisecting, dividing or joining the architecture of a space with works that are dramatic and minimal in feel.
Similar to David Ireland, Virginia Overtons practice is infused with an ethos of economy. Often using building materials commonly associated with architecture or construction sites: metal, plexi-glass, fluorescent lighting found or scavenged from resource sites or wood from her family farm in Tennessee, these materials are often transformed from their immediate use and into something new. Bent, folded, cut and/or suspended in space these materials are subject to change. Raw materials arranged into phenomenological configurations, unafraid to show their experience, history or defects. Balancing, leaning or ratcheted down, the bold adjustments of the work are always countered by a feeling of grace.
Virginia Overton was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1971 and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her solo exhibitions include the Whitney Museum of American Art (2015); White Cube, London (2015); Storm King Art Center, New Windsor, NY (2014); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2014), Westfälischer Kunstverein, Munster (2013-4); Kunsthalle Bern (2013); The Power Station, Dallas (2013) and the Power House, Memphis (2007). Recent group exhibitions and projects include: ICA Philadelphia (2016); Art Basel Parcours (2016); Pier 54, New York (2014); High Line, New York (2012-2013) and MoMA PS1 (2010).
The Garage
Beginning in February, The 500 Capp Street Foundation will open the doors to The Garage and launch a new, free rotating exhibition and program series. Starting on February 4th with Tanya Zimbardo, Assistant Curator of Media Arts at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The garage will feature Organic Logic: Howard Fried, John Roloff, Mark Thompson. Overseen by The 500 Capp Street Foundations curatorial team, following Zimbardo in February and March, The Garage will host Isabel Nuño de Buen, Braunschweig-based Mexican artist in April, and New York-based artists Patricia Lennox Boyd in June and Nayland Blake beginning in late-July.
Organic Logic: Howard Fried, John Roloff, Mark Thompson
February 3 March 18, 2017
Organic Logic: Howard Fried, John Roloff, Mark Thompson, the first project in The Garage at 500 Capp Street, takes its point of departure from John Roloffs concept of organic logic. Roloff first arrived at the phrase preparing for a 1996 talk in Germany, encompassing the work of fellow Bay Area artists Howard Fried and Mark Thompson. The presentation in The Garage gallery, located in the homes former carport on 20th Street, brings together select work by these three prominent contemporaries of Ireland.
Guest organized by Tanya Zimbardo, Organic Logic will feature key, but rarely seen pieces associated with the artists performance or event-based installations from the 1970s and 1980s including: Frieds early public and private actions with multiple participants, Roloffs outdoor site-generated kiln projects, and Thompsons relational work with honeybees in the urban environment. Through their distinct approaches, all three metaphorically addressed communication systems and investigated materials in relation to site. Roloff described organic logic as an intrinsic feature of certain Bay Area artistic practices in particular, an approach that embraces complex, systemic, intuitive and process-oriented aesthetics and methodologies. He further investigated this idea through guest co-editing, with critical theorist Mark Bartlett, the Fall/Winter 2000, "Organic Logic" issue of New Observations, a contemporary arts journal. From the base of Fried and Thompsons artist sections, the expanded scope of the publication highlighted an array of local contributors across disciplines: visual and performing arts, earth sciences, and open source technology, foregrounding the role of artists research, writing, diagrammatic studies, and conversation. Three evenings of Organic Logic artist-focused public programs at 500 Capp Street will bring several of those contributors together Amy Balkin, Sharon Daniel, Bernie Lubell, Jim Melchert, Stephanie Syjuco, Pamela Z, among others.